Nicole Berland is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill and a core faculty member at Night School Bar, a community-based learning collective in Durham, NC, that offers sliding-scale arts and humanities classes for adults.

She earned her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at UNC in 2023. Her dissertation, Watching the Watchers: Contemporary Television, Complex Seriality, and Media Literacy, analyzes how contemporary narratively complex television series reflect on their own forms and argues that understanding seriality is key to media literacy.

Prior to her doctoral work, she earned an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago (2008) and a B.A. in English, Psychology, and Plan II Honors from the University of Texas at Austin (2005). She also previously taught as an Adjunct Professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago (2009–2011).

She has received multiple teaching awards and grants, including several Mellon Teaching and Capacity Building Grants through the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (2022, 2023, 2025), the Betts Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition (2021), the SUTASA Undergraduate Teaching Award (2020), and the Erika Lindemann Awards for Excellence in Teaching Composition (2018) and Literature (2015), among others. Her research interests include television, film, narrative theory, speculative fiction, digital pedagogy, media studies, and media literacy.